US ATC held partially responsible for death

[soaringhigh650]

Interesting reading....

Florida Sun Sentinel

[ATC] did not warn Zinn that he was flying into hazardous weather and allowed Zinn to fly closer to it, Torres said. "Compounding that breach of the duty of care, he then failed to provide any navigational assistance when the pilot requested," Torres wrote.

The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows:

The pilot's continued flight into an area of known convective weather, resulting in a loss of aircraft control. Contributing factors were the failure of the FAA center controller to provide information on depicted severe weather to the pilot and the controller's delay in providing requested navigational assistance until it was too late to provide the pilot with effective assistance in avoiding severe weather.

[HEATHROW DIRECTOR]

Hmmm... guess the rules are different over there..

[radarman]

It would be very interesting to see how a coroner's court would interpret some of the ATSOCAS procedures should there be a similar incident involving a pilot receiving a basic service.

[Not Long Now]

Or indeed any service, and are the rules so different here? If we fail to pass on relevant weather reports which may affect flight safety are we not culpable? Possibly more likely to be someone in the cabin being injured in turbulence perhaps rather than a complete loss.

[Dream Land]

Never realized that controllers are now responsible to keep you out of severe Wx, always thought that was my responsibility.

[zkdli]

sounds interesting. i guess the NTSB were going on the lines that if the controller could see the severe weather on the radar he had a duty of care to warn the pilot. I guess that if we had Wx radar in the same situation, we would possibly be in the same position.

[055166k]

Current thinking surrounding "Duty of Care" should cause every controller to consider his/her responsibility. Even Basic Service [UK] may not be a sufficient excuse for lazy bone idle and unprofessional service provision. Has anyone ever sat on [ignored] a SIGMET? What is written in the Manual does not reflect current day-to-day practice.

[Hants Eaglet]

Sigmets

Not hugely relevant to the exact topic but:

Over 20 years ago at LATCC, West Drayton (RIP) management perceived a requirement to ensure that controllers transmitted pertinent SIGMETs to pilots, following an incident abroad where forecast turbulence was not advised to an aircraft and it got caught in horrible chop, which resulted in severe passenger injury. M'learned friends got involved and NATS higher management thought they might find themselves before the beak being sued if something akin happened over the UK.

Those of you old enough and still with a memory might recall the SIGMET strips which arrived on the boards on which the CSC had to scrawl a sigmet number in chinagraph alerting SCs to look at the CCTV info and tell all the pilots.

Of course it fell by the wayside as it was impractical to filter the information and target it to relevant aircraft especially on highly RT loaded sectors. The information flow was flawed and could not be relied upon too.

The basic MATS 1 requirement for controllers to provide known essential flight safety information is still there, but practically speaking how far can you go with this as an individual controller or as a unit/organisation? I guess NATS could still be found wanting in this regard, given a sharp enough legal eagle.

An interesting topic, which will probably never be satisfactorily resolved unless every single aircraft can get real time relevant info uploaded, then we can blame the drivers.